Using a Dependency Injection (DI) framework in ASP.NET MVC project is most common thing. I have used DI in almost all my MVC project and the one I use most is Unity. I know, Ninject is cool and most used DI statistically :). Unity has come a long way and there are many improvements done recently. When it comes to use Unity in a MVC project, what I most like is its ability to resolve the Types based on name matching. No need to register the Types in code or configuration, just use convention.

This blog post is not about ASP.NET MVC and Unity though. This is about using Unity as DI for Sitecore MVC project. We know Sitecore interferes with MVC framework and handle things differently. If you quickly want to know how Sitecore MVC works, watch Martina Welander’s video presentation Sitecore MVC – Getting Started. But, when it comes to using DI with Sitecore MVC any DI framework can work because Sitecore ultimately delegates the resolution of controllers to ASP.NET MVC. Recently, Mickey Rahman wrote a blog post about, how Sitecore 8.1 is now using Current DependencyResolver to resolve controllers: Changes to Dependency Injection in Sitecore 8.1. So, as long as I set the DependencyResolver to UnityDependencyResolver Sitecore MVC controllers should be resolved properly. The fact is, I even don’t have to do that. All should happen as I install the Unity NuGet package.

Here are the steps.

Open up the NuGet Package Manager in you Sitecore MVC solution and search for Unity. Install ‘Unity bootstrapper for ASP.NET MVC’.

Once this is installed you should see two files added to the App_Start folder, UnityMvcActivator.cs and UnityConfig.cs. If you open the UnityMvcActivator.cs file, you can see how the DependencyResolver is set to UnityDependencyResolver.

The next step is to open up the UnityConfig.cs file and register the types in the RegisterTypes method. You can register the types one at a time like belowcontainer.RegisterType<IProductService, ProductService>();But, this becomes difficult when your project has too many Types and chain of dependencies. As I said before, I like most the way Unity resolves the Types by convention. To do that you need to use container.RegisterTypes method like below.container.RegisterTypes(AllClasses.FromAssemblies(typeof(Services.BaseService).Assembly, typeof(ApiClient.BaseClient).Assembly), WithMappings.FromMatchingInterface, WithName.Default);

One thing you have to be careful about. Do not use AllClasses.FromLoadedAssemblies(). This will try to resolve all types in the loaded assemblies and Sitecore will throw error. In most cases we know where the classes are that we want DI to resolve. Use AllClasses.FromAssemblies option and include the assemblies that contain your Types.